First Look Friday: Invoiced

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What do you hate having to do the most in your business? For me, it's having to call up someone and tell them for the second or third time that "I really need them to pay their overdue invoice that is 120 days past due." Having to 'dun' someone for money is one of those things that I would rather someone else, anyone else, do; after all, that's why we give collection companies so much of what they collect when they do finally collect, right?

But there is an automated Accounts Receivable solution that will help you put an end to your worst nightmare of collections, and it will also solve all your sophisticated invoicing requirements that QuickBooks simply can't. Even better, it works with both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop. And, because Invoiced is web-based, the only system requirement is a modern web browser like Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. This means it can be accessed from any device: desktops, tablets, or smartphones. It also means you can access your accounts receivable from anywhere you have reliable Internet service.

Get a hands-on demo from Invoiced in the May 28 Webinar at 4:00 PM Eastern, so just go ahead an REGISTER HERE.

All About Invoicing

Creating an invoice is a fairly simple process, why else do you think they call it, Invoiced! When you first log into your account your Dashboard (like the one above seen from both a desktop and smartphone view) will not contain any details regarding your account until you have created your first invoice. Simply click Create First Invoice to get started. It pretty well is a ‘follow the fields’ process from there starting with the Customer field (as in the example below) just as in QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop.

You will have a wealth of customer information including all the history on each and every invoice along with payments, payment plans, and any specialized arrangements on the Customer CRM (as seen below).

Oh yea, did I mention Invoiced integrates with both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop? (I know I did, I am just trying to belabor the obvious.) That’s right, it’s not very often you find a sophisticated cloud-based solution that works with both QBO and QBD, but Invoiced has them both covered. But right about now you may be asking yourself, just why do I need this if I am using QBO or QBD, I can generate invoices all day with QuickBooks? It’s very true, but what you can do with those invoices other than emailing them or snail-mail them is very limited, and the types or methods of invoices you can create with QuickBooks are also very limited.

If you require almost any type of sophisticated billing at all, like subscription management or metered-usage invoicing, or prorated services, etc. it’s essentially impossible to do those in QuickBooks without some other plug-in solution. This is where Invoiced is here to do more than ‘just your day-to-day invoices’.

   ***REGISTER FOR THE 'INVOICED' INFORMATIONAL WEBINAR***

QuickBooks may be your bookkeeping and accounting software, but if you have sophisticated invoicing needs, or problems collecting, or need better tools managing your accounts receivable, then Invoiced is definitely a solution you should be looking at. That’s why you need to register for the Information Webinar and Product Demonstration that Invoiced is offering on May 28 at 4:00 PM Eastern time.

So, let’s at some of those features that Invoiced offers as a comprehensive platform for automating and accelerating accounts receivable.

Advanced Invoice Generation

  • Subscription Billing - subscriptions allow businesses to automate the billing for customers regularly. With the Invoiced subscription billing feature (an example of which is shown below), you can charge customers automatically each billing cycle, or issue an invoice that can be paid with payment methods accepted on the account.
  • Metered/usage-billing - Invoiced allows you to bill customers for metered or usage-based charges incurred during a billing cycle. These charges could be from usage, one-off purchases, prorations, or some other amount not accounted for by a customer's subscription.
  • Installment plans – Invoiced allows you to create payment plans (a typical payment plan is illustrated below) for your customers to make agreed installment payments to you within a specified timeframe. You can easily configure the plan to completely automate the collection of the installment related invoices or payments that you and your customer agree on.
  • AutoPay – the Invoiced AutoPay feature can automatically collect payment from customers when an invoice is issued. AutoPay draws payment from your customer's attached payment method.
  • and more.

Collections Automation

  • You will quite literally put your accounts receivable on autopilot and get paid faster with fewer hassles across all channels including email, text, and postal mail.
  • You can process payments within Invoiced as well as keep track of payments that happen outside of Invoiced, like receiving a check. Available payment methods: ACH, Direct Debit, Credit Card, PayPal, AutoPay, Payment Plans, Cash Receipts, and Credit Balances. And Invoiced supports the most popular payment gateways.
  • With features like automated invoice chasing and dunning management Invoiced will do the follow-up work to overdue invoices for you and streamline your collection process.
  • As part of the ‘chasing activities,’ you will specify the chasing cadences (as shown above) that automatically assign the rules and steps by which collection activities take place. You may wish to schedule repeat invoices, emailed letters, reminder notices, text messages, phone calls, supervisor calls, the variables are almost endless.  You not only set the activities but the frequency and timing for each.  
  •  On average you will get paid 8-days faster with their ‘automated invoice chasing’ feature, and 11-days faster using their ‘auto-pay’ functionality, and the Invoiced Direct Debit and Credit Card payment offerings secure customer payments 14-days faster on average.1
  • A modern, frictionless payment portal where customers can pay online with virtually any payment method and access their complete billing and payment history. (A typical customer payment portal is shown below.)
  • Sophisticated cash application tools for automatically matching unapplied/offline payments with invoices and balances
  • Virtually limitless settings for features like late fees, early payment discounts, credit card convenience fees, AutoPay, roles and permissions (User roles and permissions are shown below), currencies, business entities and more
  • Invoiced customers enjoy reduced DSO, faster average payment times, reduction in time spent on collections (up to 95%), and better payment experiences for customers.

But what about QuickBooks, how does it work with QB?

Most of you reading this are QuickBooks users and so you are interested in how it works with either QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop.

Integration with QuickBooks Online

Invoiced integrates with QuickBooks Online to extend the billing capabilities of QuickBooks. As I said before Invoiced lets you do things from an Accounts Receivable standpoint you simply can not do in QuickBooks.  From an integration standpoint Invoiced and QBO will:

  • Import Customers from QuickBooks Online into Invoiced
  • Import outstanding Invoices from QuickBooks Online into Invoiced
  • Import Invoices generated within Invoiced to QuickBooks Online
  • Reconcile payments received within Invoiced to QuickBooks Online
  • Sync payments recorded within QuickBooks Online to Invoiced

The graphic below shows the two-way exchange of data:

Invoiced is listed in the Intuit App Store, although users need to sign up separately at invoiced.com. The connection process is no different than any other OAuth2 integrated App and QuickBooks Online. 

There are a variety of ‘Sync Settings’ within Invoiced that you can control to specifically manage the way that invoices, payments, reconciliation, customers, invoices, items (products/services), accounts, discounts, and tax codes are managed or mapped.  You also determine whether you want an ‘auto-sync’ which will happen once-per-day, although invoices and payments would occur in real-time if you enabled those.  You also have an optional ‘Sync Now’ which will update between the two systems when activated.  

I found the documentation very good regarding the integration (more than 14 pages in length). I’ve seen a lot of Apps that provide as little as a single page of documentation, and almost nothing about troubleshooting if something goes wrong. There were plenty of tips on each of the ‘settings’, the ‘mapping options’, and the various types of issues that could result if you configure something one way vs. another.

Integration with QuickBooks Desktop

Invoiced also integrates with QuickBooks Desktop to extend the accounts receivable and collection capabilities of QBD. If you want to know the specific versions of QuickBooks Desktop that Invoiced works with, here they are:

  • QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions (2015 or later)
  • QuickBooks Premier (2015 or later)
  • QuickBooks Pro (2015 or later)
  • Canadian editions of QuickBooks (2015 or later)
  • UK editions of QuickBooks (2015 or later)

Obviously when a ‘cloud solution’ is integrating with a ‘desktop solution’ things work differently, and how they work also is different. The capabilities also vary because the method of connectivity is not the same, and therefore the concept of ‘real-time’ doesn’t apply.  But the following integration capabilities do exist when Invoiced and QuickBooks Desktop are working together:

  • Importing Customers from QuickBooks Desktop (when Billed)
  • Importing outstanding Invoices from QuickBooks Desktop
  • Reconciling Payments received within Invoiced with QuickBooks Desktop
  • Syncing payments recorded within QuickBooks Desktop to Invoiced

The following chart reflects the exchange of data between Invoiced and QuickBooks Desktop:

Connectivity is reliant upon the QuickBooks ‘Web Connector’, and Invoiced will generate a web connector ‘QWC Configuration’ file that provides the information necessary for Web Connector to connect with Invoiced at which time the QuickBooks Administrator must then authorize Invoiced to access the appropriate ‘QuickBooks Company file’ via the standard Integrated Application procedures. Only the QuickBooks Administrator for the Company file can make this authorization within Single User Mode.

There are some basic ‘web connector’ set-up configuration settings that mainly control the frequency with which ‘syncs’ take place between the source (Invoiced) and the recipient (QuickBooks).  For more details, you can refer to either the QuickBooks Web Connector Help information, or you can read the 8 pages of set-up instructions that Invoiced provided in their illustrated guidelines on configuring Invoiced to work with QuickBooks Desktop, including how to troubleshoot a variety of issues that are common to ‘web connector.’ Again, they provided some of the best documentation I have seen in a long time on product integration.

How Do I See You Using Invoiced With QuickBooks?

I think that most people who need this product simply need more in the way of accounts receivable management than QuickBooks, either Desktop or Online can offer. They may need more in the way of actual invoicing capabilities. For example, they may need to do subscription billing. I remember not too long ago someone wanted tens-of-thousands of dollars for a program to plug into QBO to do nothing but subscription billing. 

So, if you need Subscription Billing, this is an economical way of achieving that solution and then you can still use either QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop as your general ledger and for your other accounting needs like banking, accounts payables and payroll.

The same principle applies if you need any of the other more sophisticated ‘invoicing’ offerings, just let Invoiced do the heavy lifting of your invoice specifics and let QuickBooks (QBO or QBD) be your general ledger.

But what if your situation isn’t ‘unique invoicing’ at all? Maybe your problem is you just can’t collect on those invoices you have, the ones you prepare in QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop, and your customers just ‘run and hide’ every time you send them a bill.  This is where Invoiced offers you what I want to call ‘automated dirty work’.  You know, that work we all hate to do, the work of hounding our clients for money.

With Invoiced you can use their wealth of tools to customize your accounts receivable collections process and streamline it so that ‘it’ is doing the dirty work for you. You don’t have to ‘dun’ your customers, Invoiced is ‘dunning’ them for you. You don’t have to have to send them that reminder that they haven’t paid the invoice they promised to pay you last Tuesday, Invoiced will send them a text message letting them know you are still standing at the mailbox waiting on it.

QuickBooks may be your very best bookkeeping and accounting software, but if you have sophisticated invoicing needs, or problems collecting, or need better tools managing your accounts receivable and Invoiced is definitely a solution you should be looking at. That’s why you need to register for the Information Webinar and Product Demonstration that Invoiced is offering on May 28 at 4:00 PM Eastern.

You could go out to the Invoiced website and request a demo, but you are going to get the same kind of hands-on demo in the May 28 Webinar at 4:00 PM Eastern, so just go ahead an REGISTER HERE.

Footnotes & Disclosures:

1 - Statistics quoted were provided by Invoiced (without independent verification by the author), the data is provided for informational purposes only.

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First Look Friday articles are editorial features, they are not sponsored content. While they may contain references or 'inserts' that refer to sponsored webinars or other sponsored content, the actual feature is intended as an informational resource for our readers.